Step 2: Setting Up Your Computer

To interface between the arduino and twitter, we are going to use python. There is a library that is already put together that enables us to use the twitter API. It’s called python-twitter.

After you have installed python, install the python-twitter library and all its dependencies. If you run into trouble just consult the documentation over on the python-twitter website.

Next, install the Arduino IDE so you can program your arduino and talk to it via serial port.

Once those are set up and working, time to go grab your credentials from twitter.com

Step 3: Setting up Twitter

Interfacing with twitter used to be easy, all you had to do was put your name and password into your code and it would work. Now twitter has taken user info more seriously using oAuth, and as a result now you must register your app with twitter and get an API key.

First, make a twitter account for this project that is separate from your main twitter account. I chose, driptwit.

Then, go to dev.twitter.com and register your app, this will enable you to grab 4 important pieces of information

-Access Token
-Access Token Secret
-Consumer Key
-Consumer Secret

These keys will be needed in the python code later to interface with the twitter API. After you have those 4 codes, you should be able to continue.

Step 4: The Code: Python Side

First lets go over our python code. The python code basically uses the python-twitter library to ask twitter for the statuses of user “x”, it then takes the last status and searches for the term “#driptwit”.
if found sends the ascii value of 1 to the serial port (and to the arduino), if #driptwitstop is found, it sends an ascii value of 0.
Lastly it loops and checks the twitter account every 15 seconds looking for changes.

As you can see, below is where you enter the keys you got from twitter in the last step.